The Phoenix Center for Spiritual Direction was honored to have one of the mentors in its Apprentice Training Program, the Rev. Dr. Kelly Murphy Mason present this summer at the 2023 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago. Dr. Mason was a guest speaker in the Women’s Dignity programming track, which recognizes women and girls as a core constituency worldwide. In fact, the Global Ethic promoted by the Parliament recognizes the establishment of gender equity to be an imperative part of safeguarding universal human rights.
As a member of the Parliament, Dr. Mason endorses the Global Ethic as instrumental in promoting women’s participation in and leadership of spiritual and religious communities. Given on August 18, 2023, Dr. Mason’s presentation titled “Be As Much Yourself as Is Possible: Spiritual Direction for Women’s Liberation and Empowerment Across Traditions” was attend by a diverse audience within the Parliament, including women from Jewish, Buddhist, Catholic, Protestant, and interfaith backgrounds.
Feminist perspectives in spiritual direction
Dr. Mason called on those who currently provide various forms of spiritual care to women in their traditions to be attentive to the harmful effects of misogyny, sexism, patriarchy, and male supremacy, particularly as they have been enshrined in traditional religious teaching and witness. Dr. Mason also called on people to stay alert to opportunities for the “dignifying and divinizing of women worldwide” and to help “foster midwifing and mothering in spiritual contexts” by incorporating feminist perspectives. She included materials from feminist theologians, denominational resolutions, spiritual writers, singer-songwriters, and women mystics in her discussion, which encouraged the use of “mirroring/magnifying” and “echoing/amplifying” as approaches to working with women who are pursuing their own spiritual growth.
Women especially need support and affirmation
According to Dr. Mason, contemporary spiritual directors more and more understand themselves as functioning “in service to spiritual integration, individual development, and personal evolution” by being “welcoming of multifaith, interspiritual, and dynamic identities” and remaining “intentionally non-directive and carefully evocative” in their work with spiritual directees who seek out private counsel. With women especially, directors need to act in ways that “supportive in nature and as affirming as possible”, she declared in her presentation. She called for greater sensitivity to the experiences women commonly have of being silenced, denigrated, erased, and disbelieved. Possible correctives involve helping them to “locate themselves in sacred story” and to “trust the authority of their own voices and practice advocacy for themselves” in spiritual communities and religious traditions, she explained.
In addition to working as a mentor for apprentice spiritual directors at the Phoenix Center for Spiritual Direction, Dr. Mason currently serves as Community Minister for Spiritual Direction at Arlington Street Church in Boston, MA (about.me/kellymurphymason). Dr. Mason has devoted her far-ranging career to enlisting spiritual and religious resources in support of fuller human flourishing and has been a consultant for faith communities for nearly 20 years (www.kellymurphymason.com). She contends that psychologically informed and religiously literate spiritual direction is uniquely useful in contemporary contexts and sees the evolving field of spiritual direction as holding special potential to assist those individuals who may find institutional religious lacking in certain regards. Dr. Mason is also Co-Chair of the Spirituality & Flourishing Interest Group within the Harvard Flourishing Network (hfh.fas.harvard.edu/
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